Overall, this comes down to the ability to make money, that's driven my a number of factors.
1. Adequate scale - the basin is remote and as such required a very large in place resource to support the construction of major pipelines to market (LNG or SE). On the LNG front, the lack of a large volume of gas in the Beetaloo would push the Inpex LNG asset to find/support the discovery of additional gas offshore to carry through on the investment premise of that facility.
2. There is a switcheroo taking place in comparing the companies. Empire's acquired West Basin acreage technically holds the majority 2U gas, and that is justified in that reserves class, and they cite 3 million acres, which they have. The problem is they don't even cite Pangaea's wells as advancing the play on their own investor deck. Virtually all that acreage is west of a major regional fault, almost all of it under 1,000 meters, let alone the >1,700m window they seek in Carpentaria East.
In Carpentaria, in their own slides, they center them upon the Eastern portion. There is a massive fault that sterilizes acreage along it, they use the area in W Carpentaria to push their numbers...but don't even use it in their marketing deck? Telling. They cite faulting and well undulation and potentially impacting productivity.
3. The potentially developable core of Carpentaria East is around 100 km2, be generous and double that to include Carpentaria West. A 3 km well with 500m spacings occupies 1.5 sq km, this gives an inventory of 132 wells. If these wells were, optimistically, to provide 10 BCF (3x test rates) of recovery you have a project volume of 1.3 TCF. Spread that out over a 10 years of development drilling (it takes a well over 20 years to provide that gas). And you can drill a well a month or so for ten years. For reference midsized shale operators run 10-30 continuously.
4. Well rates, they have a normalized rate of 1.3-1.6 mmcf/d per 1000m in their recent test. This is 1/6th of the current Tamboran test. It would be fair to say that Tamboran/Origin/Santos have produced some dogs, and it is likely that follow up wells can improve. However you can't beat physics. Same reservoir at half the depth is half the gas in place, note that we don't see them citing superior reservoir. The mechanism to get gas out is fracking, and at some depth you are without adequate vertical stress to generate a complex frac. Most, or possibly all of their land is in this state. Less gas, poorer fracs cannot lead to superior wells, rather the peak of 1/2 of the rates in the basin proper are the absolute best they can do and it's more likely that they do 1/3rd to 1/4 the rate.
I am not saying that the Carpentaria project does not hold the potential to deliver some commercial results, witness Sheffield's willingness to throw some cash at it to see what happens. What I am saying is that the likelihood is much more tenuous. I am emphatically stating that the relative valuations of Empire to Tamboran are slapstick hilarious. Their present valuations, TBN 2X EEG, in my eyes reflect poor investor knowledge, TBN dilution concern and Underwood's connections within the ASX investment sphere.
So, play the stock however you want, but upon evaluation the numbers don't look good for EEG.
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